Former Twitch, Machine Zone, and Visceral executives join Outpost Games
Developer expands leadership team to drive growth of audience engagement platform
South San Francisco, CA -- Nov 15, 2017 -- Outpost Games, creators of upcoming reality show survival game SOS and the Hero interactive entertainment platform, has expanded its senior management team with new leads from content, platform and tech companies including Twitch, YouTube, Machine Zone, Electronic Arts (EA) and Zynga.
"We have two ambitious projects under development simultaneously, tackling a new style of gameplay and a platform that brings audience presence and participation directly into games," said Wright Bagwell, co-founder and CEO, Outpost Games. "There's a lot of innovation both under the hood and in how we will build our business, so we couldn't be more pleased to welcome such talent from these diverse backgrounds to contribute expertise to our mission."
Expanding corporate leadership for the company, Ed Lu is now Chief Financial Officer. Ed brings 11 years of gaming operations and finance experience, including five years as CFO at mobile gaming and platform technology company Machine Zone, where he helped launch Game Of War and Mobile Strike while scaling the company to 1,000 employees. Brooke Van Dusen also joined as Director of Partnerships, bringing with him six years of experience from Twitch where he played an integral part in business development and helped found their developer success effort.
Outpost Games is currently testing its first game, SOS, an online cooperative survival game for 16 players. Yara Khoury and Ian Milham have joined to lead the team and project. Yara joins as Head of Games and was previously a producer at EA's Visceral, where she spent six years working on the Dead Space, Battlefield and Star Wars game franchises. Serving as Outpost's Creative Director/Showrunner, Ian is a 20-year veteran who has served as Art Director on seven high profile games from companies like LucasArts, EA and Crystal Dynamics. SOS will be in Beta towards the end of the year and will be available on Steam in early 2018.
SOS integrates with Outpost Games' Hero interactive entertainment platform, which turns every player into a performer. Hero connects players with a live audience, allowing spectators to give real-time feedback and influence gameplay in unique ways. Albert Cheng recently joined as Head of Product, leading the Platform team. He brings six years of experience at Google and YouTube as a Technology and Program Manager where he focused on live streaming and the creation and launch of YouTube Gaming. Ryan Wilson, Lead Software Architect on Hero, was formerly co-founder of startups in political technology (Fantasy Congress) and online music rhythm gaming (JamLegend, acquired by Zynga), and later served as CTO on Zynga's flagship Farmville franchise.